Richard Calder obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/27/richard-calder-obituary

Version 0 of 1.

My father, Richard Calder, who has died aged 78, was an engineer who lived and worked all over the world and who had a special love for Brazil.

He was born in Surrey but brought up in New Zealand, where his father, Malcolm, was an air vice-marshal and later chief of the New Zealand Air Staff. With his mother, Peggy (nee Mandeno), and his sister Susan, the young Richard travelled around the UK, Malaya and South East Asia visiting his father, who was stationed in various parts of the world. At Wanganui Collegiate boarding school in New Zealand, Richard’s passions were flying, fishing and aeroplanes, and he desperately wanted to join the air force. But bad eyesight precluded him from doing that, and instead he graduated with a degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering from Canterbury University, New Zealand.

He married Elisabeth Baber, a publisher, in 1959, and they moved to Britain, where Richard became an aeronautical engineer with Rolls-Royce in Derby. The company posted him to Canada in 1962, where they endured the worst winter for 35 years; to San Francisco in 1963, where they saw Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie play; to Washington DC, where they watched the funeral procession of John Kennedy on Arlington Bridge, and finally, in 1964, to Brazil where Dad immediately fell in love with everything he found there, especially the music, the dancing and the heat. He and my mother came back to the UK four years later, and were divorced in 1973.

Dad then met and married Margot Knowles, a speech therapist. He was by now working in the fledgling computer software business, and they went to Brazil for a couple of years before finally settling in the US in 1977. They lived in a beautiful part of Connecticut, acquiring a lovely old house, a disorderly collection of sheep, chickens, dogs and cats, and a barn full of stuff to fix.

On his retirement, Dad kept busy by tutoring distance learning MBA students at Durham University and Charter Oak College, Connecticut and, with Margot, founded BRAYCE, a charity dedicated to offering youngsters from Brazilian favelas educational and leadership opportunities in the US and American students internships on social programmes in the favelas.

He is survived by Margot, by his children, myself and Toby from his first marriage and Caitlin and Fenna from his second, by five grandchildren, Jack, Milo, Tilly, Arthur and Nicolas, and by Susan.